Virtual Desktops, Or Why Two Monitors Aren’t Better Than One

Of all the arguments that surface during holiday gatherings, the last one I expected to become wrapped up in this season was over whether dual computer monitors are a worthwhile investment. But that was indeed what my geeky family members and I fought over the other day.

Of all the arguments that surface during holiday gatherings, the last one I expected to become wrapped up in this season was over whether dual computer monitors are a worthwhile investment. But that was indeed what my geeky family members and I fought over the other day. And since no one agreed with me that they’re not worthy of the investment, I’d like to take this opportunity to make my case to a broader, more enlightened audience, namely The VAR Guy’s readers.

Let me clarify my point: It’s not that a second physical screen isn’t cool to have — just like a private jet or pied-à-terre on the Champs de Mars would be nice to own. Instead, my argument was that dual monitors aren’t worth the extra investment and hassle involved, because virtual workspaces provide almost all the same functionality for free.

Think about it: To run a PC with two screens requires, most obviously, a second monitor, which in these days of cheap computers can cost almost as much as the PC itself. You also need a higher-end video card with two outputs. And no matter which operating system you use, you have to configure the dual monitors at the level of both the video driver and desktop manager, which is not always as intuitive as one would expect in 2011.

In contrast, virtual desktops — which have been built into every Linux distribution I’ve ever seen in the last decade, and which Apple “borrowed” to introduce into Mac OS X in the form of Spaces in 2007 — are totally free and demand virtually no extra configuration. Nonetheless, they provide pretty much the same functionality as dual monitors: they reduce desktop clutter, allow users to group different types of applications together on the visual display and make it easy to switch between windows without minimizing or maximizing.

As a bonus, there’s no practical limit to how many virtual desktops one can have. Compiz supports up to 1,024, for instance. No matter how rich or geeky you are, I guarantee you can’t connect that many physical monitors to your computer.

The only task I can think of where having two physical screens might be truly more efficient is for copying text by hand from a document on one screen into a different document on another. But my first question to people who do that is what calamity befell their control, C and V keys. The whole point of computers is that they save you from doing boring, repetitive things, of which manually copying text from one digital source to another is a prime example.

Why It Matters: Software Is Better Than Hardware

Of course, my geeky relatives — of whom none has ever used Linux, and only one uses a Mac, mostly because he bought into the Steve Jobs personality cult at an early age — disagreed. They insisted that, bigger being always better, software solutions to the challenges addressed by dual screens can never compare to fulfilling one’s red-blooded American duty of buying more electronics hardware.

And I would just let the issue go at that, assigning it to fundamentally different world views, if it didn’t also speak to the larger question of whether we’ve been bred by the IT industry to believe that we never have as much hardware as we need.

After all, a lot of people profit from hardware upgrades. Not only do OEMs make money, but software developers also cash in when users purchase new and upgraded applications to support their new toys. Thus neither programmers nor device designers — at least in most of the IT channel — have much of an incentive to encourage users to get the most out of what they already own, rather than just buying more stuff.

Of course, behaving in ways that maximize profit is only natural. I don’t mean to insinuate a grand conspiracy on the part of hardware and software manufacturers. But I do think that it’s not only for want of creativity that Windows still lacks built-in support for virtual desktops, almost three decades after the concept was introduced. I suspect instead that Microsoft correctly calculated that adding the feature might temper the speed of hardware upgrade cycles, which would in turn dampen demand for new Windows licenses.

But, as my family will also not fail to point out to me once again this holiday season, I like peanut-butter sundaes with orange sorbet. Clearly my judgment is dubious.

10 comments

dual monitors on Mac is a nightmare with this global menu – have to jump back and forth as a monkey.
To me, the global menu is the most annoying Mac “feature”, but Apple fan-boys claim it’s cool, and Canonical implemented it (no wonder Ubuntu’s popularity is sinking).
Most of Windows fans don’t even know such thing as a virtual desktops even exists (through third party software of course ) – the same as multi level clipboard
Linux guys as always are trying to open people’s eyes for cool technologies, but they don’t believe and insist using their broken OSes

I always use two monitors on my desktop. One is a 23″ and the other a 24″. Both 1920×1080. The 24″ screen is my reading screen. That means I’ve tipped it on its side so it’s narrow and tall, like any reading surface should be. I also use it to test that my apps can switch orientation properly. The screen is directly ahead of me, so that when I read long stuff, I can just lean back and read for hours without becoming tired. The 23″ screen is a normal wide screen that I use for other stuff. In times of heavy development, I might connect a third 24″ screen that’s normally used by another computer and I use this for testing stuff. Screen space is _good_.

Workspaces are completely different, and certainly can’t help you with orientation. I probably use workspaces _more_ when I have bigger screen space. Of course, as a geek, you always want redundancy anyway. If one screen breaks down, you should have at least one other that you can use until you can replace the broken one 🙂

By the way, using Ubuntu 11.10, I didn’t have to configure anything. No drivers to be installed for my HD5850. Everything just works right out of the box. And multi-monitor setups are one of the primary focuses for future development, which means it’s going to get even better.

But as a writer, you really should investigate having at least one vertical screen in addition to the horisontal one. It’s really nice.

I use two screens and I am considering a third. For me the computer is my work space. I am not a multi tasking spaz, but I will start something in a window and I want to monitor it without having to switch to it. For some of my legal clients they find it very beneficial to be able to review and pull from multiple documents. I always tell them that the screen has become your desk and some work needs a big desk.
I have not used virtual desktops and wonder why Windows does not have them. Or are virtual machines becoming our virtual desktops. @Jo-Erland makes a great point about the vertical monitor, it is amazing that all documents and online magazines are still formatted for paper. Contrary to that I hate web sites that break an article into three pages because it takes time to load each page and I would prefer to scroll.
Interesting article, thanks for your point of view.

hmmm, the vertical monitor is a great idea. I’ve never seen anyone using it that way. I have to admit that if money were no object — or weren’t so much of one — and I didn’t feel bad about wasting energy, I’d certainly like to have more screen space; it never hurts. But I was thinking in the post primarily about whether the extra cost is justified. For some people it undoubtedly is, though I’m skeptical how many non-geeks — who don’t realize that they can rotate their monitor to use as a reading device, for instance, and who don’t spend time writing code — would truly put a second or third screen to good use.

I have two desktop computers on my desk. I have a KVM. At times, switching between the two systems is awkward and breaks my flow. Since one system is a sacrificial goat and the other my main system, I often have to switch back and forth.

OTOH, “peanut-butter sundaes with orange sorbet” sounds interesting. I would like to try that.

Back in the 1980s, a company called Radius offered a monitor called the Pivot for the Apple Mac. This was an A4 screen that could be rotated 90° to work in either portrait or landscape orientation.

Great-sounding idea, never really caught on.

Oh, and as for multiple virtual desktops versus multiple real physical monitors, it’s easy to increase the number of virtual desktops without spending any money. Plus you get neat visual effects like sliding desktops or the rotating desktop cube, which no amount of money will buy you with multiple physical monitors.

Yes, let’s all ignore the facts and just accept that it never caught on, and Macs are the only computers that can rotate a screen.

Once in a while, you should reexamine your beliefs and look at the data. The fact that Steve Jobs once claimed that Apples customers doesn’t read books, doesn’t create reality. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand why he wanted to create this vision of illiteracy among Apple-users. But the fact is that pivoting screens have been popular for ages, and will continue to be popular for all foreseeable future. I have never seen a modern computer monitor that doesn’t support VESA FDMI, which was created in 1997, and there are numerous VESA-compliant stands that supports pivoting. In other words, all modern monitors support pivoting.

If it was up to me, of course, video would be tailored to a format that was primarily focused on reading, since people actually do read more than they watch video. No amount of reality distortion can change this fact. But Mr. Tozzi has a good point. It seems, these days, that reading in portrait mode is some sort of radical idea, because everyone is being told that widescreen is the thing. Of course, if you go into any kind of book shop or library, you’ll notice that nearly all books are narrow and tall, not short and wide. It’s been like that for thousands of years. The idea that this has changed because knowledge has been made digital, is ludicrous. It is sad that people spend their lives propagating other peoples misconceptions without ever reexamining their own thoughts.

Ten years ago, when I bought my first widescreen, I actively tried to avoid it because I do read and write a lot. I didn’t have to spend all my creativity on the idea that a screen can be tilted, which actually makes widescreen more suitable for readers. I believe the biggest value the internet holds, is that it enables us to share good ideas without forgetting the old ones, even though they should be. Try to tilt your screen once, just to understand. Don’t blindly accept the default. Go and deviate. It’s fun!

Your idea that you have to choose between multiple screens and multiple workspaces, is as strange as it is wrong. More screens simply means either more workspaces or bigger ones. Even when I use three relatively large screens, I still use several workspaces. To me, they are not visual appearances, but contextual groups. It will be interesting to see how Ubuntu progresses in this area since it is a primary focus for 12.04 and later versions.

This article is so baffling that I’m tempted to think that it was written tongue-in-cheek in an effort to see what kind of outraged responses you’d get…

The primary, possibly ONLY, significant benefit to multiple displays is *simultaneous* application display – for example, allowing the user to work in one app while referring to another without minimizing or cycling between them, and without requiring them to make compromises in order to show all the apps on the same screen.

Not everyone needs that, but most busy information workers – even in very small businesses – have many applications that they are working between throughout a typical day. At a minimum, they will have email and some kind of Line of Business application, and it is extremely common to be working in either one of those while referring to the other.

Desktop virtualization addresses exactly none of that.

Furthermore, although I can’t speak to how easy it is on a Mac, adding additional displays to a Windows 7 system is frankly trivial – the only software setup you should have to do is telling the OS the relative positions of the displays. Yes, a 2nd display will typically add $200-300 to the overall cost of the computer but that’s peanuts compared to the productivity gains which both the literature and my own company’s anecdotal experience would peg at between 5-30%.

Heck, I’d spend $300 in a heartbeat to get even a 1% productivity increase from an employee. Consider that the $300 investment will likely last 3+ years and 1% of a $50,000 salary is $500. That’s a 500% ROI on my $300.

Now, I do think that there are dimishing returns on extra displays beyond the second. That is, a 3rd display seems to confer around half the benefit of a second, and a fourth is half that again. I’m speaking generally, of course – I’m certain there are people for whom 4 displays is optimal.

Anyway, desktop virtualization is very cool AND very useful, but for entirely different reasons than extra monitors. I think you’re trying to draw a comparison between apples and staplers…

Perhaps dual screens aren’t for you, but as a photographer it is great to have a second vertically oriented screen for portraits which would only fill half the screen on the landscape monitor
It is also very helpful to have a large preview on one screen while viewing thumbnails on the other (this works really well for showing images to clients)

A vertically oriented screen is great for emails or reference documents while working on another screen (remember those clipboards that used to attach to the side of your screen)

Two horizontally oriented screen is also great for video editing giving a much bigger preview while the footage is scrubbed and edited on the other screen

Another use is for people who have to view sequences of data (brain scans, dna or similar since they can see more at once without scrolling or zooming in and out

Your points are subjective. One mans junk is another mans treasure. Virtual desktops are great, but not in my line of work. I work in a 3rd line development and support role in a Citrix based environment and dual screens (or even widescreens when talking Windows 7 VDI) are much more productive when working on system upgrades, Group Policy, writing technical documents and disaster recovery… it isn’t as easy with virtual desktops because you still only see one screen at once. I use them at home, and they are excellent. I feel your choices are more about what you are trying to achieve than anything else.

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